An evaluation of storage systems based on network-attached disks

The emergence of network-attached disks provides the possibility of transferring data between the storage system and the client directly. This offers new possibilities in building a distributed storage system. We examine different storage organizations based on network-attached disks and compare the performance of these systems to a traditional system. Trace driven simulations are used to measure the average response times of the client requests in two different workloads. The results indicate that it is possible to reduce the workload on the file manager and improve performance in some workloads. However, in other workloads, reduced cache hit ratios may offset the gains of distributing the network processing workload.